1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of network information services including data gathering and transmission over wired and wireless network connections and pertains more particularly to restructuring of personal data and, in some cases, general data for the purpose of enabling receipt of such data by a variety of connected and portable network appliances without requiring added hardware or software.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
The information system known in the art as the Internet, and the Internet subset known as the World Wide Web (WWW), represents the largest publicly available source of information in the world. Anyone with an Internet-capable appliance and an Internet connection can navigate the Internet for the purpose of accessing virtually any type of data that may be held in any one of millions of network-connected servers adapted for the purpose.
The most traditional network appliance used for navigating the Internet and downloading data therefrom is the personal computer (PC). More recently however, a host of other electronic communication devices have been adapted for network connection and navigation on the Internet. Some of these better known devices include cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDA's), pagers, and notebook and laptop computers. Some types of these appliances access the Internet via wireless connection. In other cases, data from the Internet is transmitted to such devices through a gateway to a network generic to the device. An example would be that of a cellular phone or pager capable of accessing e-mail and other Internet accounts information.
The Internet operates under a shared bandwidth protocol wherein data packets are transmitted whereby each transmission competes with all other current transmissions for available bandwidth resources. The total amount of bandwidth resource available to network appliances accessing the Internet is a function of network traffic, reliability and capability of lines, power of appliance processor, nature of intermediary network, and a host of other variables. It is not always possible to maintain an Internet connection for any reliable length of time considering all of these variables. Sometimes, there are periods when a device simply cannot gain access at all. In other cases physical connection is only possible on a periodic basis, and an appliance is therefore only intermittently connected.
Even with the more powerful and traditional PC's or notebook computers there may be times when available bandwidth suddenly drops resulting in a disconnect or “moof” as it is often termed. If a moof occurs when attempting to download data, another attempt must be made to re-access the network, re-navigate to the data source, and attempt a retry of the data download. This can be frustrating for users operating such devices as cell phones, pagers or PDA's which are already operating on high latency and/or low bandwidth connections.
Administrators of network equipment and connection architecture as well as companies that host such as WEB-based information services and the like are improving aspects of communication with various portable network devices by upgrading lines and equipment, developing better data compression and bandwidth reservation techniques and lobbying for more bandwidth for wireless intermediary networks. However, one area that has been largely overlooked is the very format and structures of data that is transmitted. For example, HTML or XML-scripted content is largely unsuitable for transmission under low bandwidth conditions to small portable devices. As a result, such devices having lower memory and operating under lower bandwidth resources are limited to certain types of data such as only e-mail or voice mail.
A system known to the inventor and listed under the cross-reference to related documents section provides a capability of automated login and navigation to Internet or other network-held sources written in HTML, XML, or other languages for the purpose of retrieving and presenting WEB summaries to subscribers according to client/enterprise directives. This service uses scripted templates prepared by knowledge workers using known site logic to enable navigation, not just to the site, but to specific content posted on the site. A parsing method is then used to identify appropriate data based on the provided script directives.
The data obtained by the above-described method is held in a server for user access (via PC), or pushed to a user (PC or alternate appliance) according to enterprise rules. The data is typically presented in the form of a WEB page made accessible to a user having suitable equipment for retrieving and viewing such pages. However, in another embodiment, the data is re-formatted when possible for transmission to a user specified Internet appliance such as a cell phone, laptop, PDA, etc. The user must first access the service using a device that supports a browser interface. Data is forwarded to alternate devices only on user request and assuming the user has configured his or her alternate device to the service. In order to receive some types of data, special software and/or hardware implementations must be made to the alternate appliances.
The above service does not support independent device access to the Internet (except for devices already capable of browser navigation), nor can it deliver certain content held in a format that is not readily convertible to a format generic to the software running on such alternate devices. Moreover much content that would be convertible may still overload the memory of certain alternate devices such as pagers or cell phones if additional data restructuring and synchronization steps are not taken.
It will be appreciated that there is a growing variety of existing and new portable-type devices that are being adapted for Internet access. Most of these devices communicate according to device-generic protocol and are unable to receive and disseminate certain other types of data under normal circumstance. Furthermore, low bandwidth connection states and limited memory provisions preclude many of these devices from broad Internet navigation capabilities and limit download capability in terms of time and type of data content that may be received.
What is clearly needed is a method and apparatus for intelligent restructuring of personalized data and, in some cases, generalized data from the Internet into model/device-specific data formats such that it may be easily made available for transmission to and presentation by a variety of known communication devices having either direct or indirect Internet connection capability. Such a method and apparatus would broaden the scope of Internet-sourced data types that a communication device could independently access and receive without requiring hardware or software modifications to such devices.